Paper short abstract:

Fire for Girls is a short experimental documentary set at the Saraswati Soni ashram in Dehradun North India. author/director: Harsha Menon year of production: 2018 languages: liturgical Sanskrit and Hindi length: 20 minutes

Paper long abstract:

Fire for Girls is a twenty minute experimental documentary set at the Saraswati Soni Akhila Bharatiya Ashram in Dehradun, North India. Founded in the 1930's by Saraswati Soni, a female Indian Independence freedom fighter, the ashram provides refuge for girls and widows. This observational piece focuses on the sounds of the daily morning fire ceremony, a Sanskrit ritual from 1800 BCE that is still performed for empowerment and peace.  Usually reserved for men, here the older women teach the ceremony to ashram residents girls in a form of embodied transmission. Produced at the Harvard Film Study Center and evocative of Nathaniel Dorsky's devotional cinema, the film is an experiment in sonic ethnography and South Asian feminist historiography.

technical requirements: I will project a video file H.264 (mov) from my MAC laptop. I will need to connect my MAC laptop to a projector.